Hasta La Gadget!

I would be hesitant to put a plane engine inside of a car, let alone mounting one on a motorcycle. That’s just crazy. I just let others do the work and enjoy their success from afar. Like German DIYer Frank Ohle, who actually outfitted his motorcycle with a 150hp Rotec Radical R3600 nine cylinder aircraft engine.

Frank calls his bike the Red Baron and it took him around 18 months to build this insane chopper. It took a custom built chassis to do it, but the end result looks damn good. I love the little propeller behind the front wheel – nice touch. He upgraded the suspension and overhauled all of the electronics too.

The video says it all. Awesome bike. Plane. Bikeplane.

[via Top Gear]

Epson’s 3D display glasses, the Moverio BT-100 have been floating around as a development platform for a couple years, and APX Labs is the latest to hack the headset. APX Labs is a software firm best known for creating Terminator Vision augmented reality tech for the US military, and it decided to use the BT-100 as a vehicle to develop and showcase a smart glasses platform it’s built to work for both business and consumer applications. In order to get the functionality it needed, APX grafted a 5 megapixel camera, mic and a full suite of motion sensors to provide nine-axis head tracking onto a Moverio headset.

All that gear is shoved into a 3D-printed module and attached to the BT-100 to turn it into a pair of smart glasses. In addition to the cameras and sensors, APX also hacked an Epson daughter board onto the Moverio’s controller to allow an HDMI video feed from a smartphone to be shown on the displays. This result? A system that understands where you are, what you’re seeing and hearing and a UI that allows users to glean information from the world around them using voice commands and head gestures. That should sound familiar to fans of Google Glass, but by using Epson’s binocular displays, these smart glasses can convey depth in a way Mountain View’s monocle cannot. (Not to mention that Glass doesn’t even do AR apps… yet). The hardware we got to see was a crude prototype built for demo purposes only, but the software platform shows promise and Epson’s got a version two Moverio headset in the works — so perhaps you can see a bit of the future of smart glasses in the video after the break.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

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Ahhh, the venerable Atari 2600. The godfather of console gaming has, in recent years, seen a resurgence as a hacker’s muse — mods to its innards and controllers are legion on the web. Recently, a new mod emerged: a controller that combines the capabilities of the Atari’s joystick, paddle and keyboard controllers. It’s crafted from a small wooden box, a cannibalized joystick, an Ethernet cable, some switches and a smattering of other electronic bits, and there’s a full how-to on making one of your own on Instructables, courtesy of user x2Jiggy. If the mere mention of such an all-in-one has those DIY juices flowing, head on past the break for a construction video and see how it’s done. It’s high time you dust off your stock 2600 and break out Pitfall, Adventure or, well, Breakout.

Filed under: Gaming

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Via: Hack a day

Source: Instructables

When it comes to modding consoles there are two names that generally stand above the rest: Mr. Benjamin J. Heckendorn and the man known as Bacteria. The latter has done his fair share of portable machines, but his latest completed project takes console hacking to lofty new heights. Unity crams a stunning 15 different consoles (including classics like the SNES and not-so-classics like the TurboGrafx 16) into a single, admittedly bulky box. The one of a kind entertainment center is the culmination of three years and $700 invested in bringing this dream to life. All of the hardware inside is either from the original consoles (no emulation of clone systems here!) or custom built — such as the 16-position switch. And, it should go without saying, that it took a whole lot to get these gaming machines to share a single power supply, video cable and control pad. Now that the epic project is finally complete Bacteria has provided a rather lengthy walk though of all the various features and the work that went into it, which you can check out after the break.

Filed under: Gaming

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Source: Made-by-Bacteria 1, 2

It’s far from the first Arduino-based mod we’ve seen for a guitar, but this one from David Neevel of the Wieden + Kennedy ad agency may well be the most unique. Apparently tired of having to drop his guitar and pick up a keyboard every time he wanted to send an email, he decided to make the guitar the keyboard, and replace the dull drone of keystrokes with an extended solo. As you might expect, the project comes with a fairly high degree of difficulty, but those interested in trying their hand can find the basics to get started at the source link below, and get a look at what’s possible in the video after the break. You’re on your own with the moustache.

Filed under: Misc

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Source: W + K Blog